7/21/06: Critical Assignment (2004)Contrary to popular belief, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. didn’t work for the United Nations. That’s why he could foil tyrants. The UN has no interest in crimefighting, so it was particularly exciting to find the DVD of
Critical Assignment. We couldn’t wait to see a political thriller “endorsed by the United Nations Environmental Programme.” What we got was fine comedy.
The film starts with a generic uprising, as Our Journalist Hero—billed on the DVD as played by Michael Power—saves a GSN correspondent from a bomb. We’re not sure why the Game Show Network is covering international unrest. There must be valuable prizes at stake.
Anyway, that stunt wins our brave reporter a Journalist of Merit Award. We see the awards ceremony, where the honor is handed to “Africa’s own Michael Power!” (
IMDB clears things up, crediting the lead role to Cleveland Mitchell.) Power gets to give a speech about the importance of communicating “what’s true and right.” Next on Power’s “true and right” agenda: the global water crisis in his homeland of Africa.
Cue the travelogue footage. The President of (presumably South) Africa is meeting with his cabinet. He’s taking the $500 million in the defense budget and spending it all on purifying the water supply. Everyone applauds. Nobody asks, “What kind of President thinks clean water and military defense is an either/or situation?”
Maybe our hero can solve that mystery. He’s arriving at the airport, but first has to attend a party where everyone wants to hear him talk about his humble nobility. Power also meets with his Little Old Lady editor, who informs him that the President’s decision to solve Africa’s water crisis has turned Power’s assignment into a controversial story. Actually, that would make it a timely story, but maybe she’s using journalistic lingo we can’t understand.
The editor then goes to meet some American in a hotel room. She finds him dead, and the assassin beats her into a coma. Power, in his role as a journalist, is able to stroll into the morgue and sort through the dead guy’s personal belongings.
Power also keeps writing his article about the water crisis. He goes to an African village where an engineer takes him to the local stream. We're told it’s a “cesspool of disease.” The engineer and Power then drive ten miles down the road. “It took me more than a year to discover this place,” explains Mr. Engineer. They walk a few more yards to a gushing natural spring that the engineer claims has “enough clean water to cater for communities within a 50-mile radius.”
There’s an African village washing their babies in a cesspool of disease when there’s a natural spring just 10 miles down the road that they’ve never discovered? And it took an engineer with a car over a year to find that same spring? Yeah, there’s a crisis. Africa is full of idiots in need of divining rods.
The convoluted plot eventually involves an evil white millionaire philanthropist. The UN should know something about that after dealing with Ted Turner. Power saves the clean water program, and the villains are nicely clarified. Specifically, the CIA is heroic and the American military is corrupt. That’s how the UN likes to see it—especially since it was the CIA who sent Joseph Wilson to lie about Saddam Hussein in the
New York Times.
But the real reason the UN loves this film is revealed when a character refers to an “Arms-for-Water Conspiracy”—adding that there’s too much of one and not enough of the other. Yeah, the United Nations has a real problem fighting those Arms-for-Water schemes. Oil-for-Food? Never heard of it. And check out that handsome Michael Power. He looks just like Seal without the scarring from lupus. People are scarred by lupus? Hey, we’ve got an idea for the sequel!
Make it your own: Amazon really will sell
anything.
